The Global Care Chain: An Ethics of Care Approach to Transnational Gender Justice in Migrant Domestic Care Work

In recent decades, there has been a growing phenomenon of women migrating from the Global South to work as live-in caregivers for households in the Global North. This creates a tension between local and transnational pursuits of gender justice - while care worker migration "liberates" women in the Global North from care burdens by giving them the freedom to choose between work and care, it also perpetuates gender injustice transnationally. The thesis is framed in two parts. Firstly, it argues that the dominant egalitarian paradigm is insufficient in characterizing the issues of injustice that arise from the industry of migrant domestic care work. Secondly, it forwards a positive argument for an ethics of care approach that is grounded in an empirical view of the self as relational, vulnerable, and embodied. By foregrounding care relations as a central aspect of justice, an ethics of care provides a simultaneously critical and complementary approach to egalitarianism, by painting a more complete picture of how the industry for migrant domestic care work perpetuates systemic inadequacies in care, and by being better able to motivate solidarity and action for transnational gender justice.